Fun in the Sun(flare)

☼ Sunflare: it seems to be all the rage in photography circles these days.  I actually have a sunflare idol -- you can check out her genius here and here!  I am clearly not "there" yet and often waffle during post-processing with contrast adjustments, trying to maintain a look that is dreamy rather than foggy :)  If I do catch sun spots, it's often luck of the draw as to where they land...not so dreamy if they obliterate a face.  But it's fun to play and take advantage of the "golden light" (the hour or two after sunrise and before sunset).  The backlighting is also great practice for spot metering, where I manually expose for the face v. the whole scene;  otherwise these type of shots would likely result in silhouettes.

And supercute guinea pigs don't hurt either :)  Little Myah...

 

And turning the camera on sweet baby Ella (no photoshopping of those baby blues!)

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An afterthought:  As I was processing the photos of Myah, I remembered the first time I captured a few rays of sun...by accident.

This was taken shortly after I started shooting in manual, before I knew how to spot meter or intentionally catch the sun.  Going back even further, the photo in my blog header was taken the first morning I got my dSLR, without a flash but still in Auto.  Both were shot before I upgraded camera bodies and lenses...yet they remain 2 of my all-time favorites.  So while I understand why many photographers cringe when they hear "your camera takes great pictures", sometimes just sometimes you can get lucky!